The present invention lies in the general field of table top games, "bingo" in particular. Even more particularly, it deals with a rack or holder which permits one player to use a multiplicity of cards in a single game, in an efficient manner.
At the same time, the invention deals with clips and racks that may be used to efficiently mount and display cards and other types of documents used in many other fields, e.g., photographs, medical charts and the like.
With respect to bingo, in this popular indoor sport most avid contemporary participants will play more than one card in each game. Some of them, in fact play so many cards as to approach the limits of their concentration. While this practice is not discouraged by the promoters of the game, heretofore there have few devices available enabling the multicard player to keep all of his cards in front of him, and what few devices there are have proven relatively inefficient. Typically such a player spreads all of his cards out in front of him, each lying flat on a horizontal table top with the array spread fore and aft to his left and right. This takes up a good bit of space, where otherwise two or three players might be accommodated. Great concentration and some measure of physical agility, including keen eyesight, are then required if the one person plays, for instance, as many as 20 cards. There has been an obvious need for some sort of rack or other device to permit playing a large number of cards without such disadvantages.
The only such prior art device known to the present inventor is a card holder in the form of a pair of toothed rails or racks (linear gears) extending away from the player. The upper extremities of the teeth lie in a common horizontal plane, and the depths of the sockets lie in another horizontal plane. The bingo cards are inserted so that their lower edges enter the sockets of both racks, and these sockets are contoured so that the cards can be flipped between an extreme back position and an extreme forward position, each about 45 degrees away from a vertical orientation. Such holder has not proven feasible, as it requires the user to sit in a stretched-neck position, so that he can look over the top of the forward-leaning cards to see the next card in the rear, still leaning backward. It is also awkward to reach behind the cards tilted forwardly to move the shutters of the next card. And, obviously, only the fronts of the cards are useful; the player can not read any card inserted backwards.
A card holder box somewhat similar to that just described is disclosed by David R. Miller in U.S. Pat. No. 4,241,921. Miller's transverse grooves, however, are not carefully contoured to receive only a single card in each groove, nor do the grooves control the extreme positions of the cards; he teaches that the grooves simply prevent the bottom of the cards from slipping. Miller found it necessary to include a pair of tilted supports in his holder, one leaning forward and the other leaning backward. Since all of the cards rest on the grooved horizontal bottom of his box, Miller's device has the same disadvantages of the rack device described above, plus an additional disadvantage. Since the Miller box does not keep any spacing between adjacent cards, the back of each card touches the front of the card behind it. When a card is flipped from one position to another so that they brush together, the shutters on one card may be inadvertently moved, giving the player a false reading on numbers that have been played, delaying the game and casting suspicion on the player.
A "filing device" that might be thought adaptable for playing bingo is disclosed by Chatham in an earlier U.S. Pat. No. 1,119,925. Chatham discloses a shallow drawer in which a group of thin L-shaped plates are hinged on a like number of pins extending through the upright sides of the drawer, with filed papers placed between adjacent plates. Each plate has both a nearly vertical position and a nearly horizontal position. In the nearly vertical position the plate leans slightly to the rear of the box and is supported in such position because the joint of its two legs rests on the bottom of the box, one of such legs being much shorter than the other and extending from such contact to the hinge pin, and being perpendicular to the main leg which extends upward from the box with the described nearly vertical tilt.
The principal disadvantage of the Chatham device lies in the nearly horizontal positions of the hinged plates, because in such positions the player cannot make any use of the back surfaces of the plates. If it were to occur to him to clip a bingo card to such a back surface and then to read and play this card, after playing the front card and flipping the plate to its forward position, he would discover that such position is too far from horizontal. The plate nearest him would depart only slightly from horizontal (but in the harder-to-read direction, the plate's surface sloping down and away from him), but the departure would increase on the second plate, grow worse on the third, etc.
This result follows in part because bingo cards have an appreciable thickness, but mostly results from Chatham's construction. Like the other holders described above, in Chatham the hinge pins all lie in a common horizontal plane. When identical flat members of appreciable thickness are pivotally mounted on such an array of hinge pins, they can not be rotated to horizontal positions because of space interference. In going from front to rear, the tilt becomes additive, and it becomes difficult or impossible to read anything on the back of the rearward plates, unless the reader stands up and moves his body to a strained position.